Well, I followed through on my commitment to dope out my BSoD (thanks to all who
offered help and suggestions), and was victorious, in that failing sort of way.
I devoted a little more attention to the logs and determined I did have a
hardware issue with my RAM. I got four matched sticks of RAM and installed them,
and sure enough, my system passed the RAM test it previously failed. As for the
bad news, this may come under the heading of not fixing something that isn't
broken (I mentioned my system crashes were pretty infrequent), as when I headed
out to the wasteland to play Borderlands 2 with my buddies last night, I began
suffering all sorts of texture glitches and pauses, making the game unplayable,
and some visual glitches are also showing up in desktop applications. So even
though it was fine before my RAM swap, my new GTX 760 is now acting all flaky:
3DMark runs for a while, but eventually halts with one of two errors, the
benchmark either quits saying Windows lost focus, or quits saying the video card
was disconnected. I found forum posts suggesting EVGA cards don't like beta
drivers, so I rolled back to the WHQL-certified drivers, but to no avail. The
event viewer shows I have multiple listings of Event 500 and Event 501, which
suggest switching to Windows 7 basic, and while these errors may well be related
to my issue, they also date back not only to before I was experiencing these
problems, but before I replaced my video card. Things are messed up enough that
may have to turn to truly desperate measures and actually call EVGA tech
support. Shudder. Wish me luck.